Why is Germany’s biggest newspaper telling its readers to envy the British?
Bild newspaper, 24 Feb (Bild)
“Dear Brits, we envy you.” This was the banner headline in last Wednesday’s Bild. Boris Johnson’s roadmap had just been announced, with its Covid liberation day of June 21 — but for Germans there was “no hope”. Germany’s leading tabloid was fulsome in its praise for the British vaccination programme, which reached the 20 million mark yesterday, leaving Germany far behind on about 4 million. The gap is growing because the UK is vaccinating about 450,000 a day compared to Germany’s 175,000.
Belatedly, the Germans are now considering a prioritising the first jab — having condemned the British for doing precisely that. Unless Berlin does a U-turn to permit a longer gap between doses, a study by Humboldt University estimates that up to 15,000 people will die unnecessarily. But even such a change of course, though welcome, will do nothing to ameliorate the underlying problem across the EU: the fatal shortage of vaccines.
The opinion editor of Bild, Filipp Piatov, pulled no punches in his blistering attack on Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen in today’s Times (behind a paywall): “With every British jab, the European vaccine failure looks more and more like the tale of two leaders who put ideology over good politics and who were so eager to demonstrate the superiority of Brussels bureaucracy over the nation state that they forgot to do their job.”
He paints a shocking picture of the German vaccination crisis. With some residents of care homes and other vulnerable groups still waiting for a jab, “our pensioners have to call the hotline up to 150 times to get an appointment”. Yet last summer, Chancellor Merkel forced her Health Minister, Jens Spahn, “to write to von der Leyen, begging forgiveness for having tried to set up contracts with manufacturers without Commission permission”.
Piatov pins the “abject failure” of the European Commission onto their “misconceived and mismanaged” plan, which resulted in orders for a vaccine developed in Germany being placed four months later and approval a month later than the UK. Mrs Merkel and Mrs von der Leyen are still resisting “vaccine nationalism” by forcing the convoy to move at the speed of the slowest ship. As a result, he says, they are tarnishing the European idea by association with their own failure.
It is fascinating to see how this new narrative that is emerging from Germany will play out in Brussels and the politics of the Continent. Piatov is scathing about the incompetence of Stella Kyriakides. The Greek Cypriot Health Commissioner was given “the most important task in EU history” by Mrs von der Leyen — responsibility for vaccine procurement. But she “posted a picture of herself relaxing on a balcony last September while the EU had still not secured a fraction of the vaccines it needed”. Why is she still in her job? In any government accountable to voters Ms Kyriakides would have been gone long ago — but nobody is ever sacked from the EU Commission.
As for Germany: it looks as if the Covid crisis — which should have been Angela Merkel’s crowning achievement — will instead leave her reputation in tatters. Jens Spahn, who hopes to succeed her, can at least claim that he was overruled while trying to serve the people who elected him. Last weekend the German Chancellor was still digging herself deeper by refusing to be given the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because, at 66, “I am too old”. The German authorities are stubbornly refusing to authorise the vaccine for patients over 65, despite overwhelming evidence from the UK that it delivers excellent protection for all age groups. Mrs Merkel thereby joined Emmanuel Macron in undermining what he called this “quasi-ineffective” vaccine, resulting in resistance by the elderly across the EU. At least President Macron has now distanced himself from his irresponsible comments in January, saying that he would be happy to receive it himself. But the damage has been done — and thousands are dying across Europe.
As of last weekend, just 5 per cent of the EU’s population have received their first jab, compared to 14 per cent in the US and 27 per cent in the UK. In Israel, a country often criticised by Europeans, the figure is 53 per cent. Hungary has broken ranks and others are fishing in the “grey market” to secure supplies of vaccines. Serbia, which is next in line to join the Union, has raced ahead of its Balkan EU neighbours by doing deals with Russia.
The overall picture is one of Europe still struggling to get its act together on vaccination, with little prospect of lockdown and other prophylactic measures being lifted any time soon. By the summer, with vaccines still in short supply and new variants continuing to emerge, Covid deaths in the EU may still remain high. In the US and UK, which suffered more severely than most of the EU last year, the worst is probably over — thanks to their vaccination programmes. In the race against time to emerge from the pandemic, the nation state has proved nimbler than the bureaucratic bloc.
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